21st Century Dead by Christopher Golden (ed)
Author:Christopher Golden (ed) [Golden, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
V.
TOM HAD BEEN HALFWAY into his eggplant parmesan when the kitchen staff came hopping over the counter, screaming and cursing in four languages.
At first, he thought it was a bomb.
Hot on their heels came the ripe brown stench he’d come to know so well of late: rich as a symphony in its ugly aromas, like a padded brown fist between the eyes.
A moment later, people came sloshing out of the restrooms, shrieking and tracking the awfulness behind them.
Tom swallowed fast, threw down his fork, and began to push upstream against the panicked crowd.
This looked like a job for Sewerman.
* * *
Ten minutes later …
“Yeah, it’s blocked,” said the Jeep.
In his rubber hip-waders and matching slicker, the Jeep looked more like the Gorton’s Fisherman than a master civil engineer. But he knew the City’s tangled underworld of tunnels, sewers, and shafts better than anyone alive before Z-Day.
Tom looked up at the stout outflow pipe that clung to the ceiling of the service tunnel beneath the mall. “But this is just toilet drainage, right? We switched all these things over to the new network last month.”
“Yep. And she’s already clogged. I told them, but nobody listens.” The Jeep cracked three nuggets of Nicorette gum into his mouth, hidden under his full, white beard and curly handlebar mustache. The Jeep normally smoked his pipe like a locomotive, but methane hung thick in the air. “You got rubber boots?”
They called Eugene Prosky the Jeep because he always had all the answers, like the magic little critter from the old Popeye cartoons. After he retired, the Water Department had kept his home number on speed dial. When the City fell apart, the Jeep and six other people, including his grandkids, had holed up in a Civil Defense shelter under the old U.S. Mint. Six months later, the Jeep and the kids were still there. The others tried to escape through the BART tunnels and never came back. Should’ve listened to the Jeep—
“No, I’ll just stand back and let you do the honors. But unless they’re dumping trash down the toilets—”
“All kinds of trash ends up down here.”
At the end of the tunnel, the Jeep unlocked a gate with his massive ring of skeleton keys and entered the pump house. The toilets and sinks for the entire mall converged on the big pipe that filled the small room. In the past, it had fed into the main sewer line and gone to the southeast waste-treatment center. But in the last few months, Tom had drafted a plan to redirect the sewage lines to the old storm-runoff-control center near the ferry terminal. The plan was to close the loop and recycle the City’s waste for the gardens.
It was an elegant solution. Bypassing all the old infrastructure cut through a gordian knot of two centuries of stopgap solutions. It would be simplicity itself, if the fucking thing would just work.
“Stand back,” said the Jeep as he gripped the first bolt on the pipe’s filter housing with his wrench. “A little more.
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